Just curious, is there any way to shut off the backlight completely for low power operation?

There are commands lcd.display(), lcd.noDisplay() andlcd.setBacklight(), but nothing for turning off the backlight completelyto reduce power by 60 ma. ?

Quote from assembly instructions

Writing Your Own SketchesThe Adafruit_RGBLCDShield library is a derivative of the LiquidCrystal library that comes with Arduino so you can call any of the functions that you're used to and they'll work just the same.There are two extra functions you mway want to use. One is lcd.setBacklight(color); which will change the backlight color assuming you have an RGB LCD on. At this time, the library does not do any PWM on the RGB backlight, so you can select from 8 different colors (inlcuding OFF) - if you place these #define's at the top of your sketch you can simply call whichever color you want to appear.

I like to point out that the 4x20 is, of course, larger than the standard 16x2 LCD that fits on this shield. I useda 18 pin female 0.10 space socket on the shield board to mate to the larger 4x20 LCD. Some nylon spacers and hot glue wasused between both boards for support. Note: the larger LCD blocks the tact switches from being used!

Since the tact switches were not accessable when using the panel mounted larger 4x20 LCD with the shield, I used Adafruit's tact switch navigation joystick to supply the proper inputs to the shield. On the back of the shield, I installed the I2C 4.7K pullup resistors, in case they had to be changed for different configurations and I also soldered the LCD contrast pot on the back so I could easily adjust the LCD contrast. As you can see, I hacked this shield to death for to meet our project's special requirements but in doing so brought up a new product idea for Adadruit. A standalone RGB LCD controller with tact "joystick navigation. Another addition would be to add an I2C digital pot or PWM to control the contrast from the user's microcontroller?

BTW ... Adafruit and especially Limor Fried would be extremely proud of our project because we used over a dozen high tech parts from Adafruit without which our project would never be completed!

I'm looking at the 16x2 RGB backlight LCD and had another modification question. I would like to use a joystick to control it. I noticed that mentioned above I was just curious if the joystick having a common ground on all 5 switches would cause a problem. I can't see from the pictures of the LCD shield what the traces look like. PID: 504 joystick with PID: 714 LCD

"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each" - Plato